Village Life
The Wcela Brothers’ Orchestra
Based on the memories of Bishop Emil A. Wcela
Before television’s blue glow settled into Bohemia’s living rooms in the late 1940s, Saturday nights belonged to the fiddle, the cornet, and the shuffle of dancing feet. The hamlet, then still proudly Czech in flavor and rhythm, “made its own entertainment,” as Bishop Emil A. Wcela later recalled. And at the center of that homemade music sat his family’s band: the Wcela Brothers’ Orchestra.
The Chronicler
The Bishop Who Remembered
The chronicler of this lost world was no ordinary witness. Born in Bohemia on May 1, 1931, Emil Aloysius Wcela grew up on Walnut Avenue, the son of Emil and Albina (Kovarik) Wcela. He attended St. John Nepomucene School in the village, graduated from Seton Hall High School in Patchogue, and was ordained a priest in 1956. In 1988, Pope John Paul II appointed him Auxiliary Bishop of the Diocese of Rockville Centre — making him the first native son of what is now that diocese to be elevated to the episcopate. He served until his retirement in 2007 and died in Ronkonkoma on May 21, 2022, at the age of 91.
The bishop never lost his ear for the music of his childhood. His remembrances of the Wcela Brothers’ Orchestra preserve a corner of village life that would otherwise have vanished entirely.
Origins
A Band Older Than the Bishop
The Wcela Brothers’ Orchestra was already a known quantity in Bohemia by the time the future bishop was old enough to hear it. The Suffolk County News of November 9, 1934 — when Emil was just three years old — carries a notice that the Sunrise Hotel, on the corner of Smithtown Avenue and Church Street, was hosting a metzli soup (a traditional Czech blood-and-liver-sausage dish) and pig roast on the coming Saturday, “with Wcela’s Orchestra providing the music.”
That single line in a 1934 weekly newspaper is the earliest hard documentary evidence we have of the band, but it almost certainly was not the band’s beginning. Tony and Emil Wcela were already established musicians by that date, working a circuit of village halls, hotels, and Fire Department dances that stretched from the late 1920s through to the years after the Second World War.
The bishop’s memory, then, is the late chapter of the orchestra’s life — the years when a small boy sat among the dancers with his father, eating frankfurters and watching his uncle at the piano. The orchestra itself had been playing Bohemia’s dance floors for at least a generation.
Venues
The Halls Where Bohemia Danced
The nightlife of old Bohemia orbited two buildings.
The first was the C.S.A. Hall at 1339 Smithtown Avenue — built in 1920 by the local “Blue Turners” faction of the Czechoslovak Society of America and today subdivided into apartments. In its prime, the hall held 250 people in a sweeping ballroom anchored by an elevated stage. A heavy roll-down curtain hung over that stage, elaborately painted with a scene of the mythological founding of Prague. Behind the stage sat the barroom, where, between sets, refreshments were always close at hand and old-timers gathered to argue Fire Department politics.
The second hub was St. John Nepomucene’s parochial school, which had opened in 1927 under the direction of the School Sisters of Notre Dame. To turn a school into a dance hall, the community simply folded open the partitions between two classrooms, transforming a place of learning into a place of celebration. Tragically, the building was destroyed by fire in 1957.
The orchestra also worked the village’s hotel ballrooms — the Sunrise Hotel at Smithtown and Church, the Central Hotel up the avenue, and others. A band that could keep a dance hall full on a Saturday night was a band in steady demand.
The Lineup
A Family Affair
Music was the Wcela family trade. “All in my father’s family had learned to play musical instruments,” Bishop Wcela once recalled. His father, Anton “Tony” Wcela, played the violin; his uncle Emil Wcela played the piano. Around the two brothers gathered a remarkable lineup of local talent:
- Bill Stochl on drums
- Joe Weigel on cornet
- Lincoln Weigel on clarinet
- Jerry Hejduk on trombone
- Frank Huml on saxophone
- Evelyn Huml (Frank’s wife), who would occasionally sit in on accordion
It was a band stitched together from the village’s defining trades — cigars, music, fire, faith — and from the social bonds that held a working-class Czech hamlet together.
Repertoire
From Polkas to Czardas
To keep the floor packed, the band had to be versatile. They came prepared with Czech polkas and waltzes for the older first-generation pioneers, but their book was deeper than that. They played the czardas — the dramatic, tempo-shifting Hungarian folk dance — for neighbors who walked over from “Little Hungary,” the tightly knit Hungarian enclave just west of Lakeland Avenue, centered on Louis Kossuth Avenue (named for the great Hungarian patriot of 1848). And, of course, they kept up with “all the newer dances for the young people,” the syncopated American numbers that the bishop’s generation considered modern.
The Wcela Brothers thus did something quietly remarkable: on a Saturday night in a Czech fraternal hall, Hungarian neighbors danced their national dance to music played by a Czech American band — and everyone went home satisfied.
The Pay
The Five-Dollar Gig
It was a labor of love, not riches. Bishop Wcela remembered overhearing his parents discuss the night’s economics: “The usual pay for each of the orchestra members was $5 for the evening.” Even that modest sum wasn’t guaranteed. He recalled his father coming home and saying, “They didn’t have much of a crowd so I gave the $5 back.” Such gestures captured the unwritten code of village musicianship — half performer, half neighbor, with the second half winning out when it had to.
End of an Era
The Silence of the Screens
The dance-hall era did not so much end as evaporate. “The coming of television took away much of the incentive to put on shows and go to dances,” the bishop later wrote. By the 1950s, leisure had migrated indoors — out of the grand ballroom and into the private living room. The C.S.A. Hall would survive another decade or so as a fraternal headquarters before being sold and converted to apartments in the 1960s. St. John’s school burned in 1957. The Wcela Brothers’ Orchestra simply stopped being called.
But the legacy never quite disappeared. In the attic of the family home on Walnut Avenue, Bishop Wcela noted, there still sit “lots of English and Czech popular music” — silent sheet music, waiting on a downbeat that hasn’t been counted off in seventy years.